3 Reasons Why Outsourcing Your Content Plan is Genius!

There is no doubt that every website, from ecommerce to service to publisher, is in constant need of content.

Content marketing isn’t just the hot buzz phrase; it’s a critical component to any successful marketing strategy. In a survey recently published by the Content Marketing Institute, 86% of B2C marketers surveyed engage in content marketing.

But what happens to the content plan when the brand doesn’t have a writing team big enough to handle the rush of their approaching peak season, or the team is so limited that every member has a million things on their plate? Somehow the content strategy that was carefully crafted by a marketing team falls from ideal to simply trying to make it happen … too quickly shoving it to a backburner with fingers crossed you won’t have to deal with it today.

Sound familiar?

It’s easy to think of content planning and writing as an easy to-do on your list. All you need to do is assign an hour or two of someone’s time and voila!

But the reality is a content plan has dozens of topics planned each week, with distribution channels eagerly waiting to receive newly published content. Writing a few hundred words for each topic takes a lot of effort. Let’s be real, the writer first needs to clear their head and get into the flow of writing. Up next — topic research, brainstorming, and title wrangling. Then… the words can flow. Let’s hope, since your writer is now down to about 48 minutes left!

Of the 86% of B2C marketers engaged in content marketing, most reportedly allocate about 28% of their marketing budget to content marketing, with more than half looking to increase that amount in the near-term. But both B2C and B2B marketers admit their struggle with justifying the effectiveness of their content marketing. So how do you create the content you need, in your brand voice, while nailing its effectiveness?

A smart outsourced partner could be your answer.

The right partner may be able to offer your content marketing plan the ability to stay on topic and on schedule, crafting high quality content quickly, on brand and on budget. It may seem like a silver bullet at first glance, but let’s dissect this idea a bit.

To write this post, I played at least 5 roles: researcher, writer, search engine consultant, social media manager and content manager. As content marketing plans go, this isn’t the only article that needs to be written today! How many could I actually get through each day? How many does the plan need? Oh dear…

There are many outsourced paths you can take here. You could hire a freelancer, or a dedicated internal resource. But many of the challenges we faced above—quality, scalability and cost— exist in these options too.

We may be a little biased here, but the right outsourced partner could be a very smart move.

An easy way to boost the quality of your content, outsourcing gives you immediate access to multiple writers with a wide range of expertise. The writers are professionals and can be trusted to cover any topic while adhering to best practices, brand voice and style guides.

A favored feature we built is the advanced filters tool below. I’ve used the word “cheap” here for example. You can see, once the unacceptable term was added a flag was raised and revision is required.

2) Scalability1 + 1 (doesn’t always) = 2.

More than half of recently surveyed marketing professionals said they are planning to increase their content marketing budgets. On average, more than 25% of the total marketing dollars are allocated to content marketing. Here’s the rub, each increase in budget doesn’t guarantee an incremental increase in content scale.

An outsourced content creating partner can provide access to the professional writers needed to support your plan. With a team of trained writers on your side, you can focus on the content plan, the topic brief, and the distribution strategy. The writers will focus on the keyword research, headline wrangling, article writing, editing, and optimizing. With the ability to write multiple pieces of content simultaneously, your content production time is short, your output is many while the quality and brand enthusiasm stays strong.

Take a look at our example project status above. With a quick glance, you can get the status of all projects and the delivery schedule by day. Accessing up-to-date information allows you to better plan your campaigns, and manage internal resources.

3) CostContent development can be expensive. Traditionally, it’s been a simple calculation of resource hours x hourly rate.

The right outsourced partner has a bench full of awesome writers that know how to write engaging stories, compelling call to actions, and optimize content for search engines and readers eager to share a great article.

An outsourced partner can be both cost efficient and ROI effective. Who doesn’t love that pairing duo?

If you are ready to consider outsourcing a piece of your content creation process, or the whole thing, there are a few important considerations to pay close attention to. It’s important you have a tight collaboration with your partner. You’ll need to develop work flow and routines to get the highly polished product you are expecting.

At eZdia, we’ve solved many of the worries commonly held in outsourcing partnerships.

We’ve solved the need for a refined workflow and routine with our content creation tool. With a quick log in, you have access to view the status of all requested content, click-in to view the details of each piece of content. This includes keyword research findings with expected volume for the chosen terms, the body of the content and the final, edited version.

Need to control brand voice or the use of industry terms? How about leave specific terms out of all projects or a specific topic? This can be achieved by including this information in the tool filters. Rest assured, any rules set will be followed with the help of our technologies.

So are you ready to take a look at how our content creation platform can provide the ultimate support for your content marketing plan?

Get in touch!
Our team will be at PubCon in Las Vegas October 21-24. We’ll be available to schedule live demos and in-person discussions. We’ll also be attending, presenting and exhibiting at SES Chicago, November 4-7.

If you are planning to attend either of these conferences, we’d love to meet you!

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Padmini is a marketer, a mom and a musician (the 3Ms). She loves to read about new and emerging technology. She has successfully led marketing initiatives for mobile, cloud, semiconductor and now, eCommerce. In her last position as a marketing head for a mobile company, she helped the company triple their revenue in less than 3 years.
She has several marketing publications and her case study on InfoSys and the challenge of global branding was published by the Harvard Business Review.